Army Painter display stand in MDF

After an unusually productive evening at BuildBrighton last night, we’re pleased to share plans for our Army Painter paint pots stand:

Here are the SVG files – load these into Inkscrape and save as whichever format best suits your laser cutter (or the laser cutter at your local hackspace!). We used the BuildBrighton “white laser” which runs off RetinaEngrave – a virtual printer, so could just print these straight from inkscape, but also successfully saved as .dxf and can them on the “red laser” – an HPC 3020 hobby cutter.

Obviously we designed this stand for our Army Painter paints but will work for any dropper style bottle, up to 25mm across and 80mm high (a few others have already shown a renewed interest in miniature painting and have also got a set – or partial set – of similar paints).

To make this stand, you’ll need three sheets of A4 mdf (or acrylic).If using mdf, the cost of materials works out at about £1.50 (we buy our medite/laser mdf in bulk, in sheets and an A4 sheet works out at less than 50p). This is a massive saving on some of the laser-cut stands on eBay which sell for £20-£30!

Assembly should be straightforward – the top sit on each “step” of the sides, there’s a bracing strut across the front of the bottom step, two struts at the top and bottom of the back and the last strut goes under the pots on the bottom step (our first version didn’t have this, and when you lifted the whole stand, the first row of paints still sat on the table!)

We used PVA glue to hold everything together. You can use Superglue for “instant grab” while assembling, but we liked that PVA gives a bit of wiggle-room to slide everything properly into place.